


The Unauthorized Adaptation of World War Z

by dutchessof



Category: World War Z - Max Brooks
Genre: Book Adaptation, Multi, Screenplay/Script Format, War, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-13
Updated: 2015-11-07
Packaged: 2018-04-26 03:06:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4987723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dutchessof/pseuds/dutchessof
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A hopeful answer to the question: "Can the book World War Z be successfully adapted into a screenplay?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Author's Note

 As two separate media, a book can stand alone from its movie adaptation and a movie must stand independent of the book, and taking the book as a verbatim translation to the screen would cheapen its potential. For example, the interview structure of the book _World War Z_ would create redundancy in the movie: Interviewer introduces himself, flashback to the events, maybe with a voice over, end of the interview, repeat. And not all the interviews are the same length. The longer interviews detail a lot of information and cover a significant time span, while the shorter interviews aren’t long enough to bother with showing a real time enactment at all.

Another thing that stumps an adaptation of _World War Z_ is trying to force a narrow Three Act Structure on it. In Three Act Structure, one protagonist is in direct conflict with an antagonist while side characters push the protagonist’s character arc and subplots explore the theme—generally speaking. Sometimes side characters—like the best friend, the romantic or emotional interest, or the heavy for the antagonist—can have their own subplots, but, traditionally, Three Act Structure is about the protagonist/antagonist core conflict. Trying to apply that core conflict to _World War Z_ would force a story, which has many protagonists, to have one protagonist and limit the scope of the narrative. For example, the antagonist would be the zombies, but as a mindless horde with only the drive to eat, a zombie can only be used as a set piece, that is, when the protagonist needs to face a reversal in their fortune, then the zombie is dragged out to provide conflict. This is antithetical to Three Act Structure, which usually has a few scenes to establish the antagonist’s goal, but in _World War Z_ , the zombie is not articulate; they merely _show_ what they want, and what they want isn’t adequate to provide enough _drive_ for this adaptation. The protagonist and antagonist must be in direct conflict with each other, or if not, then the structure fails and the adaptation becomes a different kind of beast.

The choice to make _The Unauthorized Adaptation of World War Z_ into teleplays for a TV miniseries was the scope and the scale. The book’s scope is vast, a true world war, its precipitants and resolutions, and a single movie, no matter how well it’s handled, can’t reach the same sense of mass and volume. If a TV show is a novel, with every episode as a chapter, then movies are a short story, with a single goal and the speed to reach that goal. As for the scale of _World War Z_ , it is undoubtedly massive, specifically seen in the interviewer who moves from place to place—the size of the zombie menace, the size of the number of survivors even if they are a fraction of humanity’s earlier numbers, and the size of the need to take back the planet—and to have a single movie try to address such a scale would either lead to a sprawling epic the likes of which the movie-going public have never seen before, or dividing the book into multiple movies all with a Three Act Structure forced upon it.

So how to solve these dilemmas?

Plot the movie thematically. I finally read the book when the internet reviewer, SF Debris, posted a great six part analysis of _World War Z_ where he broke down the themes of the novel, like the greed and selfishness that allowed to the virus to spread; the complacency of those in power because they were looking out for their own interests; how fear drives rational thought from our minds and makes us react in dangerous ways; the need for unity if humanity plans to survive and thrive across the world again; and the lesson of taking responsibility for all that has occurred. Wikipedia provided the other half, especially the theme of survivalism, so thank you to both.

Use the Three Act Structure paradigm. “Didn’t you just point out how Three Act Structure would do a disservice to the book?” I did, but the paradigm isn’t the same as the core conflict. The most important thing to remember about screenwriting is that what the screenwriting books and screenwriting articles provide is a form, _not a formula_ . If anyone can plug the elements into a formula, then movies would be amazing all the time. The form, also called a paradigm, is a guide for how to structure a screenplay. The paradigm can be as big or as small as necessary. _Chinatown_ wouldn’t be structured the same way as _Predator_ . For one, both movies require vastly different needs, and _Chinatown_ is 2hours 11minutes while _Predator_ is 1hour 47minutes, but both movies use a guide to a) keep the story from devolving into something unwieldy and b) provide a destination. Even Beginning-Middle-End is a guide. Setup-Action-Climax-Resolution is a guide. Setup-Payoff-Consequences is a guide. There must be some way to keep everything focused or the narrative fails.

Creatively use the interviews. If the themes are what drive the plot, and Three Act Structure is what holds it all together, then the interviews support the narrative. For example, the longer interviews that spanned a substantial length of time and involved several events that contributed to the larger story were the interviews that were broken up and used as the backbone for different paradigm points, like the entire Homefront USA section and when Todd Wainio was with Army Group North taking back the United States. On the other hand, the interviews that focused only on one story and completed said story without having to return to it later were used to illustrate one of the themes: when Jesika Hendricks’ family went north, and how the theme of survival forced them to make desperate choices. Then, the smaller interviews were used as transition scenes: the eyewitness in the Fujifilm blimp, the first introduction of African rabies, among others. And if the interview had the most emotional impact, like Sharon retelling how she escaped the church, the meeting with Redeker, then that interview was kept intact in order to support the plot point.

Why not write it as a fic? Because _World War Z_ is already a book. I didn’t even think about attempting an unauthorized adaptation until I saw an article on io9 about “books that are impossible to adapt, but someone should try”. _World War Z_ was on that list, and in the comments section there was a brief discussion about how to handle the adaptation. Some people wanted to remove the oral history aspect and film it like a mockumentary, but on-the-ground filming would only work in real time, that is, if people weren’t so terrified they would have whipped out their cameras. I even made mention of that in response to a comment. Other commenters wanted to keep the mockumentary style, provide voice overs, and intercut the interviews, but that has a tendency to down play the terror of a zombie apocalypse. When people are too removed from something, their memories provide the only context that an audience would view along with photos and/or maybe reenactments, but a two or three hour documentary would be very dry (and I love documentaries) and turn off those who would not want to sit through one. So, to keep people engaged and to tell as powerful a story as possible and to make it into a successful adaptation, the miniseries would have to use a combination of narrative in the form of real time enactments that show the zombie terror, docu in the form of the interviews, and voice over as a form of both.

Pull it all together and you get _The Unauthorized Adaptation of World War Z_.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Isn’t this just plagiarism? You’ve lifted entire phrases from the book. You didn’t create anything new.” Because this is a transformative work. Fanworks are protected under that banner, preventing Cease and Desist emails from flooding inboxes. To take the book and adapt it into a screenplay is transformative; to take the book and reprint it in a blog is infringement. To make an unauthorized adaptation, one that—so far—hasn’t led to legal action, especially since this writer makes no money off this work, makes it a good faith adaptation, one that won’t end with a court hearing. (Fingers crossed, folks!) As for “lifting entire phrases from the book”—and not just the interviews, mind—there are a lot of screenplay adaptations that do the same thing. Read the _Twilight_ screenplay (found at imsdb dot com) which was adapted from the book of the same name, and the opening description of Bella is _verbatim_ from the book, among other descriptions. Read J. Michael Straczynski’s adaptation of _World War Z_ , which can be found with a Google search (seriously, I was blown away by how easy it was to find). The point is: Why mess with something that works? It’s not laziness—or _only_ laziness—but also the act of one writer understanding and recognizing the necessity of another writer’s words, and in the case of _World War Z_ an oral history relies on the description of events that have already occurred. How better to honor those stories than to simply transpose them from one medium to another?

As for the film _World War Z_ , which came out in 2013, I watched it _after_ I finished _Unauthorized_ ’s first draft. I read interviews about the making of the film—and I will post links at the bottom of the page—that all had the same response to the novel: “It’s a zombie movie.” “It’s a horror film.” I disagree. Aside from reading the book and listening to SF Debris’s podcast, I went into the adaptation cold, and so approached this miniseries as a disaster film, specifically a survival film. Since survival is the core theme of the novel (the need to survive fuels our self-interest and greed; our need to survive awakens our fear and makes us panic; our need to survive forces us to unify under a common cause; our need to survive makes us fight back), the characters who had to survive needed to have emotional stakes in the story. As such, I had to choose which characters to follow and whether or not they would have a repeat performance.

The rule in writing is to never introduce a new narrative device near the end of your story. This rule can be broken, but it depends on _how_ it is broken. As such, there are interviews near the end of the _World War Z_ where new characters emerge. This works for the book; however, I had to make a few choices: 1) Since it’s so late in the story, can this character connect with the audience fast enough for them to be significant and make us care? 2) Is this character repeating what we’ve already seen or are they introducing something new? 3) Is there a way to combine this interview with another in order to streamline the narrative? And don’t kid yourself, streamlining the narrative is what writing is all about. Too many ideas, too many characters, too much going on threatens the clarity, makes it complicated, and complicated is not a positive word when it comes to storytelling.

Lastly, I ask you to think about this: _The Unauthorized Adpatation of World War Z_ is not meant to take the place of the book—thus an adaptation—or the movie—thus a miniseries. It is, in all honesty, meant to be an exercise in whether the adaptation _can_ happen. I ask the _World War Z_ movie’s filmmakers not to be threatened by this, but if they are, I would like to end with this thought: Marvel has the movies as the tentpoles, the TV and Netflix shows as the support, and the comics as the foundation. With the _World War Z_ movie and potential sequels as the tentpoles, there’s room for a TV miniseries as the support, and the original book and survival guide as the foundation.

Thank you and I hope you enjoy.

 

LINKS

http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2008/12/03/j-michael-straczynski-on-world-war-z-the-scale-of-what-were-doing-here-is-phenomenal/

What J. Michael Straczynski tried to do in his original draft

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy3Ny4SgIL4

Video interview about JMS’s process to write the film

 

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2013/06/brad-pitt-world-war-z-drama

Article about the behind-the-scenes drama of making a zombie movie

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the subpar image resolution. I used Final Draft and didn't want to reformat 285 pages into AO3, so I converted a PDF to a JPEG and after trying different programs these were the best images.


	2. PART I

 


	3. PART II




	4. PART III




	5. PART IV




	6. PART V

 


End file.
